Technology has made many changes in healthcare, especially over the past several decades. From electronic medical records to improved methods for sterilizing instruments, and from breakthroughs in imaging to improvements in devices to monitor patients, technology has improved healthcare.
Increase Safety
Surgery can save lives and help people overcome illness or injury, but it can also be very risky. When technology helps increase the safety of surgical procedures, it’s a win-win situation. One type of augmented reality may help create accurate three-dimensional reconstructions of tumors. The complex image-reconstructing technology basically empowers surgeons with x-ray views, without any radiation exposure, in real time.
There are many ways that a surgical procedure can be safer and involve less risk, and augmented reality can help with many of them. For example, it can allow surgeons to use a keyhole incision rather than a large one, see a virtual three-dimensional map of a patient’s internal organs, and highlight areas to be focused on or avoided.
Increase Efficiency
Augmented reality can help with increasing efficiency in a variety of ways. One important way is that it gives medical trainees the freedom to explore and manipulate a lifelike human heart as it hovers in front of them. This technology even allows them to spot defects and become more familiar with the issues heart patients experience. If they encounter this type of technology during medical school, they’ll have familiarity with it from the beginning, and they can use it throughout their careers.
During a surgical procedure, the OR team has to keep track of many different things at once. Augmented reality can help with that. A headset might display a hovering echocardiogram with vital signs and data on the characteristics of the patient’s aneurysm directly above the surgical field, so the surgeon needn’t look away from the patient to multiple different displays to gather and interpret this information.
Reduce Costs
In all the chaos of the operating room, there’s often a great deal of equipment for monitoring the patient and displaying images necessary for the surgery. Augmented reality can provide a shared display, eventually reducing the need for a dedicated monitor for each aspect of a patient’s data, while providing a place where physiological data from multiple sources can merge in real time. That could result in major cost savings.
In addition, when augmented reality is used as a training tool for surgeons, cost savings may be realized there, as well. That could have very important ripple effects: the ability to train new surgeons quickly and in a cost-effective way could save millions of lives.
Augmented Reality
At 365 Healthcare Staffing Services, we specialize in the recruitment and placement of healthcare professionals in per diem, travel, and permanent assignments in healthcare facilities across the country. Augmented reality is on the horizon, and it has the potential to change surgical procedures in many ways. We’re here to help you find your next assignment now, and we’ll be here to help them, too. Call us at 310.436.3650 to get started!
